Most forms of human endeavor seem to create noise, and most of the time it's okay with me. You need to mow your lawn or cut your firewood? Fine and dandy - I can live with noise that exists for some gainful purpose. You want to race your dragster at the nearby drag strip? I'm okay with that too, because you're racing your car at a place that was designed for car races, and sometimes I sit outside on a Friday night and listen to the roaring of the V-8s in the distance.
But there are certain classes of noise that just irk me to no end.
Commercials on the radio are especially annoying. They blare in my ear, and they're always so damned insistent. Commercials on TV are annoying too, but I'm usually in a position to mute them as they occur. Radio commercials always seem to feature a rapid-fire torrent of goofy sound effects with a breathless announcer with maximum reverb bellowing Bring Your Camera!
A TV in another room always kind of irks me, especially if the TV isn't being watched. It just sits there, pumping out its endless blare of noise, and it always seems to be tuned to a TV show I really can't stand, like The Obnoxious Self-Absorbed Housewives of Hoboken. I'm trying to understand the Schwartzschild solution of General Relativity, and suddenly the TV is screaming at me about the ignominy of having a flat butt.
Loud motorcycles are no picnic either. Several towns in Arizona have enacted noise laws because the incessant racket of thousands of these rolling ego-machines eventually pissed off the whole population, and I don't blame them.
Telephones. I've never liked talking on the telephone. Never. I don't know why; I just don't. And the idea of calling someone on my cell phone because I'm bored just never occurs to me. It therefore should be no surprise that I don't like telephone ring tones, and I don't enjoy listening to people talking on their phones. I know they enjoy it, and I don't mind that, I just don't particularly want to listen to someone saying "Dude, guess where I'm at! No, man! Guess again! No, dude, not even close!"
I don't like crowd noise at concerts. I'm there to hear the music, not to listen to a bunch of people go WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Honestly, people, just shut up and listen. I like to watch videos of my nephew's doom metal band on YouTube, but they're hard to fully appreciate because there's always some beered-up numbskull in the audience who keeps screaming FUCK YEAH! It isn't the cursing that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't hear the music over his beery screeching. (Closely related to this are the people who want you to listen to some groovy new piece of music they found, but they're so busy talking about the groovy new music you can't actually hear it. Sometimes they have to explain what makes the music so groovy, but more often than not they think it'll put the music in context if they explain in great detail everything they were doing and thinking at the moment they discovered this music - "I first heard this when I was in high school, Ted and Scruffy and I had gone to the Tastee-Freez in Avondale, this was back when going to the Tastee-Freez was what we did, you know, we'd go to Tastee-Freez and talk about girls and stuff, and Ted was wearing this hat... Oh man, I remember that hat! It was like...")
There are people who echo everything I say, and embellish it. I'm in the parking lot at work, walking to my car to get lunch, and the following conversation ensues:
"Where you going?"
"Lunch."
"Lunch. Munchies. Grub. Where you going?"
"McDonalds, probably."
"Micky-Ds, the Golden Arches, Ronald's Place. Whatcha getting?"
"Maybe a Big Mac, I haven't decided."
"A Big Mac. Big Whack. El Mac Grande. Mac-a-rack-a-ding-dong-dang. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce--"
"Look, I have a half an hour for lunch, so if you want to chat, get in the car and come with me. If not, can we pick this up again later?"
I honestly think that the main reason people make so much useless noise is that introspection makes them uncomfortable.
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